On the left, shifting hormone levels over time. On the right, work (gray) and sleep (black) hours of NASA staff on Martian time gradually cycle around the clock.
Mars, thanks to its position slightly farther away from the Sun, has an ever-so-slightly longer day than we do: 24 hours and 39 minutes, to be exact. To control solar-powered rovers like Phoenix and Curiosity, NASA teams must shift their sleeping cycles to match, and it’s a lot harder than it sounds: that fraction of an hour extra means that their sleep schedules creep every day, so while 1 pm might be the middle of the night one week, say, it will have become breakfast time by the next. Staying on Mars time is so grueling that staff for the Sojourner rover in 1997 bailed on the schedule a third of the way through the mission.
But there may be ways of making the shift more graceful. In a recently published study following personnel of the Phoenix rover mission in 2008, a team of researchers provided training sessions to facilitate the switch to Mars time, including tips on when to drink coffee and when to nap, and …
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